Reddit Migration

The cynic in me screams that this post is to stir up FUD because someone at BigSocial is shitting their pants right now... :D (/s?)

But yes, you have some valid points but stretching too thin is not going to get us anywhere and will just result in people leaving due to lack of content. Remember that divide and conquer is a valid tactic too, so having many small instances isn't going to magically shield us from Bad Things (TM).

Centralization is a result of social behavior. People naturally gravitate towards the place where others are.

Like, the internet wasn't centralized by corporations. It was centralized by the users. And it will always happen. It's a very predictable pattern of human behavior.

I actually started with an account on Fedia.io before coming here, but they're down like 90% of the time and I fear it might be too much for Jerry (operator of that instance) to keep up with, at least for now. But having an account on multiple servers that I can bounce between when such things happen has been nice.

Don't do the work of monopolizing for them! The great thing about the fediverse is that we can all spread out and it doesn't really affect the user experience but it sure makes it a lot harder for wall street to buy a large portion of the network.

I fully intend to self host once the software matures a bit, so there's that. Hopefully that comes sooner rather than later.

I don't entirely disagree with the post, but it could have been worded much better, the title in particular.

I plan on switching instances whenever account transfer becomes feasible! But as it stands right now I'd rather not have to get my account set up all over again for another instance that might potentially go down or make radical changes. That was the very thing that put me off of Mastodon, before they added migration, and I'd rather not repeat that again. (If you have more time and energy than I do, and you're thinking about manually migrating - absolutely do so)

KBin has been appealing to some over Lemmy because of the similarness to Reddit and less of a learning curve due to federation.

I'm a proponent of spreading out but it does have its faults as of current: fractured content across many similar communities, more server management needed (though less cost per server). Discovering other instances from your own is harder, defederation and server politics and bots in some cases.

I like how it is in Lemmy hopping between servers, but honestly some don't like to that and that's fine. People on the largest servers should definitely support the server admins financially if they can.

@Gargleblaster Many thanks, this post is as much enlightening as it frightens me. Those who wished ill for us exist and have the means to do so.

That’s why I went with the shit just works instance

Nothing wrong with having accounts across instances. I use lemmy.ca as well as kbin, a few across mastodon, not a big deal with me to be honest.

Where have you moved to?

That doesn't make any sense. Why would Facebook be interested in buying existing instances? The code is open source, they can use it without asking permission. Their server infrastructure is way better that anything we have. And our user base is ridiculously small compared to theirs (Instagram has more than one billion users!). The danger of Facebook taking over the Fediverse is not that they buy instances, it's that they Embrace-Extend-Extinguish us.

That being said, I do think that we "are using the Fediverse wrong", and that we should gravitate to smaller instances of like-minded people. This would make much easier instance-level moderation and server load, and de-federation would make more sense. Now there are a bunch of generalist big instance (kbin.social, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works) that are federating/defederating for reasons that aren't completely transparent to their users. But if you have, say, a small doglove.rs instance and a small catlove.rs instance, they can defederate themselves without impacting users that are not involved in the beef amongst the instances.

Meta reached out to Kev from Fosstodon. https://fosstodon.org/@kev

I already have a few accounts on different Lemmy instances but you might have a point there. I'll see about other kbin instances, although this one is already cozy for me. Hopefully won't run into federation issues when going to another one like this very one had in the week of the Rexxit.

I agree with this but also I have an account on lemmy mastodon and kbin. the only reason i use kbin so much is because it has Threads, Microblogging and magazines. I really like the microblogging cause i can see all the mastodon and other people. yea but we do need to go to smaller servers and still interact. Whatever Meta touches turns to shit!

I’m a little hesitant to put on my tinfoil hat here.

But maybe it’s best that the super users kind of spread out a bit.

Spez might not give a shit that we leave, but Meta is probably all over this. “How can we make our content better than failing Reddit?”

Then again, I don’t know shit about fuck.

I agree with all that you've said

When I read the dev post the other day, I thought of the possible issue with servers. Stress and particularly financing. Yes, users could donate, but I feel it's not sustainable long term.
Hope account migration could come soon. Preferably across Fediverse. Not only within Kbin.

One thing I'll say is that both kbin and Lemmy need improvements in order to recommend smaller instances. The UX around being the first in the server to subscribe to a sub is really, really bad. Seriously, try it if you haven't yet. Magazine search won't find the sub. It won't show up on the front page. If you try and visit the sub, you'll get a 404 and no way to subscribe. You have to know specifically how to search for the sub in order to get the option to subscribe, and even then you won't see any existing content in it.

The problem is less impactful in larger instances because there's a better chance that you're not the first or that the sub was basically "seeded" for major instances. It's a terrible divide in UX.